The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Territory, Hierarchy, Security, and Fear

Episode Date: August 11, 2019

Jordan B. Peterson's "12 Rules for Life" lecture from Calgary, AB

Welcome to season 2, episode 21 of the Jordan Beat Peterson podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson, Dad's daughter, collaborator, mastermind behind the Jordan Beat Peterson podcast, and only purely carnivorous offspring. Weekly update, mom is still stable and we are still stressed. Still. Turns out she didn't go home from the hospital, instead she's being transferred from Canada to America, where they are going to finally go and fix her. So that's happening this week, well next week actually. Hopefully I'll be able to update you guys the week after next about how it goes. I honestly think things are going to be okay finally though. It's been a hell of a long time.

Nobody is as resilient as my mom though. Let's see, any other updates. Not really. When we return, Dad's 12 rules for life lecture from July my father, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. You all burdens are a soft-hearted bunch. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Much appreciate it. I see that 600 activists didn't scary off, eh? It's kind of shocked by that. You know, that was the longest petition that anybody's managed to put together so far. So it's impressive. It was good of the theater not to lose their spine. You need a spine, you know, because you can't stand up straight without one. So, okay, so I've been working on some ideas that I'm going to share with you tonight. I've really, some of you know, perhaps, that I spent four, I was at four

venues with Sam Harris, two in Vancouver and two in one in Dublin and one in London, and those will be released relatively soon as soon as we get the production straight out and the audio cleaned up and all of that. So, and they were very helpful and they they they helped me think some things through. I figured out some things that I hadn't got clearer in about 25 years of thinking. And so, you know, that's why it's useful to talk to somebody that you disagree with, you know. If you can have an actual conversation with them because especially if they're sharp because they push you to make things clearer than

they were before. And you might say, well, who cares if they're clearer, but you know, you act out your thoughts. And so if your thoughts aren't clear, then your actions aren't precise and you get into trouble. I mean, that's kind of self-evident, right? That's why you think. And so you should think sharply because you need to act carefully. And so it's very useful to talk to somebody who has thought things through

who doesn't think the same way you do, because like what the hell do you know? And if you talk to somebody that disagrees, there's some real possibility that'll tell you some things you don't know. That's rule nine, right? Assume that the person that you're talking to knows things you don't know. That's rule nine, right? Assume that the person that you're talking to knows something you don't, because you need to know what you don't know, unless everything's perfect for you.

That seems highly unlikely. So, well, that's the mark of your ignorance, right? If your life isn't everything that it should be, then you don't know enough. It's as simple as that. If you talk to people who think exactly the same way you do, then all they're going to do is tell you the things you already know, and clearly, if your life isn't everything it could be, then what you know isn't enough. So you should seek out some enemies and see if they can inform you,

because then, while there'll be a bit more to you, and maybe you'll think a bit more clearly and you won't have such a wretched miserable time of it. So, okay, so, about 30 years ago when I started thinking about all the things that I wrote about in Maps of Meaning in my first book, which I released by the way in audio form on June 12th. So if you're interested in, if you thought that 12 rules for life was useful, and you want to go into the ideas that are in it more deeply, then that's a good way of doing it.

It's a very complicated book. But it was out of that book that 12 rules for life arose. And the reason that I wrote both of these books fundamentally was because, well, it started with something I was obsessed about. I got obsessed about the fact of the Cold War back in the late 70s and early 80s. And I was really, well, it seemed like a, seemed surreal to me that the world had divided itself up, obviously not just to me, but that the world had divided itself up into two armed camps, each of which pledged allegiance, let's say, to a different system of beliefs.

That's not so unbelievable. But what was unbelievable, that was that those beliefs were so important to the east and the west that we seemed willing to put the whole world to the torch, at least to risk that, to protect those systems. Right, I mean, at the height of the Cold War, each side, the Soviet side and the Western capitalist side, let's say, had tens of thousands of hydrogen bombs aimed at each other on a hair trigger. And I don't know how much you know about hydrogen bombs, probably not a lot, hopefully not a lot. But you know that in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

the Americans dropped atom bombs on those cities to devastating in fact day. You know that a hydrogen bomb has an atom bomb for the trigger. So that's the difference between a fission bomb and a fusion bomb. For a fusion bomb, the fission bomb is just what gets it started. And we had tens of thousands of those things aimed at each other.

And there's still plenty of them around. It's not like we're out of the woods, out of the weeds, I guess. But it's better than it was. And so I was really obsessed with trying to understand, how could it be that belief systems could be so important that their maintenance was worth sacrificing everything to? You know, not just our own lives, say, but the past and the future, life itself, maybe. It struck me as a very interesting psychological issue. Like how could it be that belief systems in some sense

could be more important than everything? It just didn't make sense to me. And you know, I had been studying political science and I kind of liked that. And my first year or two when I studied political science, I liked that, studied the great political thinkers, political philosophers, you know, the classic political philosophers, Plato and Aristotle and Hobbes and Russo and John Stuart Mill and John Locke,

et cetera. And I really liked that. I thought that was extremely helpful. But then when I got up into the upper years in my undergraduate degree, I was taught essentially that people were motivated by economic concerns and that that was fundamentally what drove conflict and war. And I thought, no, it's not a very good explanation because

it's missing something to say that people fight over what they value, is to say almost nothing at all. Obviously, people fight over what they value. So it's not helpful. The question is, why do they value what they value? That's the fundamental question. And so I stopped studying political science and I started studying psychology because it struck me that the fundamental problem wasn't political or economic or sociological. It was psychological. And I believe that's the case, which is why 12 rules for life and maps a meeting as well concentrate so much on the individual because that's the psychological level of analysis.

I think for this particular problem, why are belief systems so important? It's the psychological level of analysis that's correct. Correct. So, I had this intuition that you need a belief system to structure your action in the world. You need a belief system to get along with other people. And you need a belief system to protect you from meaninglessness, let's say. Meaninglessness, that's nihilism and depression. and the whole end of what would you call it, the existential spectrum that you can inhabit, where you're essentially just flooded with negative emotion,

with emotional pain and anxiety, and that's unbearable. And that's sort of the default condition of human beings, I would say, it's probably the default condition of human beings, I would say. It's probably the default condition of life itself. It's a very well widely distributed religious idea that life is essentially suffering. And it stands to reason because people and other creatures are vulnerable and mortal. We can be hurt, we can be killed. And things tend to go from bad to worse of their own accord. And so the default condition of life isn't satisfaction or happiness.

Or even neutral, emotional being, it's suffering. And you need something to set against that suffering, partly because you actually have to do something about it, right? You have to act in the world, you have to act productively in the world or you don't just feel terrible, you actually degenerate and die. So the suffering is reflective of your actual vulnerability. So it's a practical necessity to act in the world and it's also a psychological necessity to act in the world. And you have to organize your actions towards some end,

and that should be a valuable end. And it's your belief systems that organize your actions towards some end. And so they protect you. Your belief system protects you from being overwhelmed with negative emotion. So the problem is, one of the problems is this group of people might have belief system

A and this group of people might have belief system B and when you bring them into contact with each other, there's conflict. And conflicts the way of the world, I mean, when you have a relationship with someone individually, you both have slightly different belief systems or maybe substantially different belief systems and you try to inhabit the same space within the confines of an intimate relationship. There's going to be conflict and it's because you need your belief system and yet, personally and personally, think about the world differently. So conflict is inevitable. Well, conflict between individuals, conflict between groups, conflict between

nations, the problem is that we're so technologically powerful now, can't afford conflict between nations. But people aren't going to just give up their belief systems because if you give up your belief systems, then you don't have anywhere to go and you don't have anything to do and you fall into nihilistic suffering and that's no good because it's too painful. Well, it's counterproductive first of all plus it's painful plus it's anxiety provoking but it's worse than that because and And this is where things really go off the rails, you know if if you don't have a belief system that's working for you then

not only are you in emotional pain, not only are you not doing well and in emotional pain and anxious, but that isn't where the degeneration stops because if you take anyone, including yourself, and make them suffer stupidly, pointlessly, they don't stop with being inemotional pain and being anxious. They move from that to being resentful and revengeful and cruel and murderous and past that. There's plenty of places past murderous. Genicidal. There's places past genicidal because it's one thing

to want to wipe people out and it's a whole other thing to want them to be as miserable as you can possibly make them before you wipe them out. And that's sort of where things end. Although I suspect they're unexplored nooks and crannies of hell that even extend beyond that. So, well, if you're familiar to some degree with human history, or perhaps particularly the history

of the 20th century, you know that people and states can go places that are so unimaginably unimaginably dark that you can barely tolerate reading about them, right, much less, you know, being in a situation where the thing you're reading about is actually happening. So meaninglessness is not a place that anyone wants to go. You have your belief system, but if you have your belief system, then you're going to have conflict with everyone that has a different belief system, and we can't afford unlimited conflict anymore. So, that seemed to me, well, that was a very shocking set of discoveries for me because I thought that

at the time when I was thinking these things through, I thought that if you thought something through, then the answer would appear merely as a consequence of having done the thinking properly, that you wouldn't end up in a dead end where option A was terrible, an option B was terrible, and that's all the options there were. That's not the only option. That's not the only two options. You would think that it would be because one option is you have beliefs and other options that you don't have them. It doesn't seem to be any other options, but there are. Now, I want to tell you that's a kind of way of laying out the structure of the world.

On one end of reality, there's a state of nihilistic chaos, and on the other end, there's a state of totalitarian certainty. And both of those are unacceptable options. So then what's the alternative to that? So I'm going to tell you a little bit about the way the Taoists look at the world to begin with, because they've produced a conceptual system that I think is unbelievably helpful. I think it's correct. So it's hard to understand because it isn't like the way it's a way of

portraying reality. It isn't like the way that we portray reality, us, Westerners, materialists, atheists, essentially, in our ontology, in our theory of being. Now, you know, we may be religious or not. We're a mixture, but fundamentally, the West is a materialist in atheistic society. And it's become extraordinarily technologically powerful as a consequence of that. So you can't dispute the power of that perspective as a set of tools, materialism is unbelievably useful.

But it leaves us bereft of meaning, for example, which is a big problem, given where the lack of meaning takes people. The Taoists think that the reality is best construed of as a combination of Yin and Yang. And you all know the Taoist symbol, I presume. It's a circle with something that looks like a white paisley inscribed inside of it, and on opposite of black

paisley. Now those aren't paisleys, they're serpents, they're snakes. So for the Taoists, the world is a white snake and a black snake serpents inscribed inside a circle. And in the white serpents head is a black circle, small black circle, and then the black serpents head is a small white circle. And the reason for that is because Yinn and Yang can turn into one another at the drop

of a hat. Now, Yinn is often represented as feminine. Now, that's why, for example, in 12 rules for life, I mentioned that it's a common proclivity for human beings to represent chaos as feminine. Now, I didn't invent that. The Taoists invented that. And they didn't even invent it. It's just one of the ways that that symbolic proclivity manifests itself.

It can't be laid at my feet. I don't want to take credit for it. It's just how it is. And there's reasons for it, and the reasons are deep, and they took me a long time to understand. There's many reasons why that relationship exists. And we'll go through some of them. Yen is chaos, feminine, and Yang is masculine.

It's order, masculine. Now, you know, the idea that the West is a patriarchy, which is a masculine construct, that's order, that's a reflection of the same symbolic intuition. Now, I don't like the idea that the West is a patriarchy, even though it's true in part. It's always important to remember that many things are true in part, not just true, but true in part.

So the unquestioned assumption on the part of the feminist types, the radical leftist types, the same sort of people who've been criticizing me, for example, for noticing that order is symbolically masculine, are perfectly happy to proclaim that the West is a patriarchy, which is exactly the same claim, by the way. But... Well, and then you think too, like if the West is a patriarchy, if the West is ordered and it's pathological order and that's a patriarchy, that's masculine, then there's something that isn't that that's feminine, and so far as there's something that's feminine, and it isn't order because we already wrapped that up in the whole patriarchal order thing, so it's got to be whatever that isn't, and the

opposite of order is chaos. Now you might think that chaos is a bad thing, and too much of it is, but so is too much order. So the fact that too much of something can be a bad thing doesn't mean that the thing itself is bad. You know, people poison themselves quite often, actually, by drinking too much water, but that doesn't mean that water is bad. It just means that you can poison yourself if you drink too much of it.

So don't do that, by the way, because I bet you didn't know you could do that, but you can. Alright, so the Taoists believe that reality is made out of chaos and order. See an inyang. And so, what's chaos? Well, I'll tell you a bunch of things that chaos and order are, because that'll, you can only get a sense of it by seeing it from different angles. That's really the right way of conceptualizing it.

So chaos and order are unexplored territory and explored territory. That's a good way of thinking about it. It's a biological way of thinking about it. So animals have an explored territory. And they're very protective of that. You know animals and zoos, for example, everybody thinks, well, the animals don't like to be in the zoo.

It's like, for most animals, if you open the door to the cage, they stay in the cage. That's home. And you know, if you have a cat, some of you have had cats, and you've taken your cat to a new house, a cat's don't like that. The cat's pretty happy in its house because it's going around the house, and it's sniffed out every nook and cranny in that house and it knows that there isn't anything there that eats cats. And so it's quite happy to be in that house, but then you take the cat to a new house and that cat isn't happy. If it's a neurotic cat, it can go under the couch and it'll yowl for a day or two before it comes out because it thinks there's probably things, there are things that eat cats

and there's probably some of them in this house, because that's the right default assumption. If you're small and edible, the right default assumption is that wherever you go that's new, something that eats you is there. And so cats like explored territory and when you put them in unexplored territory, then they get terrified And that's just exactly what human beings are like to and so part of the reason that we don't go places that we don't understand Physically often most of you don't attend biker bars despite your reputation bars, despite your reputation. And if you do, like more power to you, as far as I'm concerned, the world needs bikers too. Most of you don't go there because that's unexplored territory, that's just a good place

to get into trouble. And so you just don't go there by the same token. You tend not to go places that are outside of your sphere of conceptual familiarity, for exactly the same reason. You don't like to go places that are too strange, especially accidentally. You know, like if you go there on purpose and it's part of an exploratory endeavor,

then that can be an adventure. But to be dropped there, no, that's not good. That's good. One of the things that I've come to think about as a psychologist is the default human condition. Imagine this, you know, maybe you think you're sort of a calm person, you're not. You're just mostly in very safe places. Okay, that's a very big difference.

So the default human being, so imagine that you were woken up at three o'clock in the morning and you're stripped naked and you're taken in a helicopter and you're dropped into the jungle at night naked. Okay, that's what you're actually like. Alright, that's life. That's life. And the fact that you're not like that all the time means that you're somewhere that's so safe, that it's just absolutely beyond comprehension. And that's our system. Like being in this hall, being in this hall is a really good example of that. It's so safe here.

You know, despite what the protesters were claiming, it's very safe here. And so there's like 3,000 people here about, and something like that. And none of you know each other. I know some of you know each other a little bit, but fundamentally it's a whole room full of strangers. But we all believe the same thing enough so that we can all sit here and do the same thing enough so that none of us have to be in that state

that we would be in if we were stripped naked and dropped into the jungle. And the reason that is the case is because we all share a belief system and we're all acting it out at the same time. Notice everybody's facing the front in this theater. Right. And nobody is acting far as I can tell erratically.

And if anyone was, you'd be very uncomfortable about it. Very uncomfortable about it. So every single one of us in here is imitating everyone else. And the reason we're doing that is to keep the existential terror at bay. Really, really. Look, I'll give you an example. I'll give you an example. So this is a way that psychologists made a mistake.

They've made lots of mistakes. But they've learned a lot, but they've made lots of mistakes. So the behavioral psychologists thought that fear was learned. Okay, so here's how they figured that out. Mostly studying animals. And animals are quite a lot like people. Or at least, you think psychologists study rats

and they're not much like people. It's like a rat is more like a person than your idea of a person is like a person. And so rats make perfectly, even though they're not much like people. It's like a rat is more like a person than your idea of a person is like a person. And so rats make perfectly, even though they're not perfect, they're rats, rats are complicated thing. Try building one at your kitchen. It's very hard to build a rat. It's very complicated.

And so rats are a pretty good model for a person. So you have a lab rat and he's in his cage, which makes him kind of a strange thing to begin with, because rats don't live solitary lives in cages. They live fully engaged social lives in rat hierarchies. So a lot of rats kind of a weird thing. It's like, would be like you would be if you were in solitary confinement. And you know, well, there's a person in a box.

It's like, well, people don't live in boxes. So you can't even be a person in a box, really. So you could live, you could exist, can't even be a person in a box really. So you could live, you could exist, but you're not a person in a box, you're pretty, pretty peculiar thing. But be that as it may. You got your rat, he's in his cage, and this is his home cage, he knows it.

And so you watch that rat and you think, that's a normal rat. And then you wanna train the rat to be afraid. And so what you do is the behavioral idea was that rats could feel pain and then that they could learn what signaled pain and what they would manifest to the signal of pain would be fear or anxiety. That's how it was learned. So what you do to scare a rat, this is how you can scare a rat, if you need to scare one, if you go to box, put the rat in. You can electrify the bottom of the cage a little bit.

Give them a shock. And so not too bad a shock. And then you turn a light on just before the shock happens. And then you do that like 50 times. And then as soon as the light goes on, the rat goes like this. Because the rat learns that the light signifies shock. And then the rat manifests anxiety or fear to the light. So it's learned to be afraid.

And so that's the theory. You've got your calm rat. You teach him how to be afraid. And the real rats, the calm rat, and you teach him how to be afraid. But that's actually not the way rats work. It's backwards. Because if you take a rat by the tail and you move them to a new cage, you don't have to electrify the floor for him to be afraid. As soon as you put the rat in the cage that he hasn't been in,

this is the rat. He's frozen. He doesn't move. And that's because rats know that predators can see things that move, especially horizontally. That's why cats eyes are slit, by the way, because it can detect horizontal movement better, because most of the things that cats eat, like rats, move horizontally. And so rats that don't die of being eaten by cats learn that if you don't know where the hell you are, then you should just do this. Right.

Frozen in terror. OK, so then that's the rat. That's the rat, right. Frozen in terror. Okay, so then that's the rat. That's the rat, man. When he doesn't know anything, when a rat doesn't know anything, that's the real rat. When a rat hasn't learned anything, and he doesn't risk moving, that's life.

And so you don't have to learn fear. You learn the opposite of fear. You learn security. You have to learn fear. You learn the opposite of fear. You learn security. You don't learn fear. And you learn security by incorporating a belief system. And that belief system is a belief system that you share with everyone else if your society is working well. And then you have the belief system, and so does everyone else.

And the belief system then matches what everyone else does. And so you don't have to be terrified out of your skull. And so that's why everybody acts the same, roughly speaking, so that we don't have, and that's why you even act the same as you acted yesterday or the day before. You actually don't want to scare yourself too badly. I'm dead serious about this, man. Dead serious. Take a naive person

Give them a little military training put them out on the battlefield Let them come in contact with some of the things that lurk inside of them They go out in the battlefield and they do some things they didn't think they could do They get post-traumatic stress disorder they could do. They get post-traumatic stress disorder, right? Because they learn that they have no idea who they are, and they have no idea what they can do. And they learn that they were acting like they always acted partly so they didn't terrify themselves out of their skulls. And that's the human condition. And so part of the reason that we're conventional and that we adopt routines and that we mirror those routines with everyone else is because not only do we

not want other people to scare us too badly, we don't want ourselves to scare us too badly. And it's a real issue. People develop post-term soldiers in particular, but people in general develop post-traumatic stress disorder, not because something terrible happened to them. That's not enough. And you know that, because lots of terrible things are going to happen to all of you. And most of you aren't going to develop post-traumatic stress disorder from it. So, isn't mere tragedy that will do it? Malevolence does it. And sometimes it's because you

encountered someone malevolent, and maybe you were a little naively unprepared for it and so that just blows you into bits or you encounter it within yourself. So, back to the rap. So, he's frozen. He's frozen in apprehension of what might lurk beyond. That's the chaos. Now, he's in chaos that wrap. He's got no order whatsoever. And as a consequence, he's gripped and frozen in place. And then what does he do? We can't move. Because if he moves, then he might get eaten.

It's like a little kid. When little kids, when they're like six months old, four months old, they don't have any fear. They don't develop fear until they can start to move. That's when the anxiety circuit's kicking. Well, what good is it being afraid if you can't move anyways? It's not helpful. Right, so but once you can move, you cannot move.

And so you need the not move move not move circuit to be activated. You know remember if you you remember that there's a famous far side cartoon monster snorkel this little kid under covers on his bed it's like a turtle he's completely underneath there and he's got a like a pipe going out so he can breathe of course there's monsters everywhere in the dark around him. Monsters snarkle. It's like, yeah, that's the world of childhood. And that's because the child in his bed in the dark is the same creature as the rat in

the new cage. And the child's imagination populates the dark with monsters. And you might say to your child, well, there's no monsters in the dark, but you know, that's stupid. Right, you all know why, it's right, because no kidding there's plenty of monsters in the dark. Now it might be the case that right then and there because of the walls that you've put up, you notice there's walls in your house, right, they keep the roof on and they keep the monsters out. That's why you have walls and then of course there's walls around everything.

There's walls around the state. That's the army to keep the monsters out. And so the child, those perfectly well that the dark is full of monsters. And you know that none of them happened to be in his room at that moment, And you know that none of them happened to be in his room at that moment, but that's cold comfort for the child because their ancestral wisdom populates their imagination with the monsters of the dark. And so you don't actually tell your child

that there are no monsters in the dark. What you might do is get them out of bed and have them look under the bed and have them look in the closet and look and explore around and to see for themselves that everything's okay. But more importantly, to see for themselves that they're the sort of creature who go out in the dark and see if the monsters are there and prevail. Because you cannot teach your child that life is safe because it's not.

But you can teach them that they're brave enough to prevail, which is an entirely different thing. Yes, there are monsters in the dark, but you can handle them. That's way different. It's way different. And if you're a psychotherapist with a shred of credibility, you never, it doesn't work anyways. If you have people who come to you with agro phobia or obsessive-compulsive disorder or post-traumatic stress disorder, telling them that they're exaggerating the danger is of zero utility.

It doesn't work a bit. What you do is you help them learn to confront the things they're afraid of voluntarily or disgusted by. It's another variation of negative emotion, more relevant, obsessive, compulsive disorder. You don't teach them that the world is safe. You teach them that they're a lot tougher than they think. And that's a way better lesson because

the world is not safe. And you are way tougher than you think. So that's a very, very good thing. That's the optimism that's sort of at the bottom of all this pessimism. So the rat frozen, who knows what the rat is imagining. Rats are intrinsically afraid of cat odor, even if a rat has never, ever seen a cat or smelled one. If you put a fan behind a cat and blow the cat older towards the rat, it'll freeze. It doesn't matter if it's ever seen a rat. We're like that with snakes, by the way. We're actually, we're actually biologically wired to be afraid of snakes. So that's only been established, I would say, in about the last 10 or 15 years. So that's quite interesting. So

we have this capacity to populate the darkness with the monsters that have been our enemies for God only knows how long, millions of years. And that's what happens in a child's imagination when he or she is afraid of the dark. So the rat is standing there, frozen, and nothing happens. And that's a form of exploration right because if you're frozen in terror and

Nothing happens you're noticing and so what you're learning is that was long as I stand here frozen in terror Nothing is eating me and so that's actually a form of safety, right because you're not being eaten at that moment so Evidently the place that you are now that you don't know anything about is this sort of place where if you stand frozen in terror, nothing tears you to shreds. And that's actually good news. So you can start to relax a little bit, not much, a little bit. And so the rat starts to relax. And the first thing he does is sniff. And rats use their olfactory system far more than human beings do. Most animals, brains, are organized around smell.

Ars are organized around vision, but that's not the case for most animals. So the rat will start to sniff, and then if he can't smell anything that signifies danger, then he'll sniff more, and he'll start to move his head, and then he starts to sort of thaw out, and he'll make little movements, and eventually he'll start to explore his whole cage. And then when he explores his whole cage, and nothing eats him, and nothing scares him, then he'll calm down. Then a behavioral psychologist can come along and teach him how to be afraid. Right, but the thing is, it's really important that the psychologist got it backwards.

Because safety, calmness, security is not the default condition. It's learned when you become afraid what you do is unlearn it. And you can unlearn all of it. If you unlearn all of it, you end up agrophobic or you have severe obsessive compulsive disorder or something like that. You can unlearn all of it. Trauma will do that to you. Sometimes a physical illness will do that. Big enough shock will do that. There's lots of things that will do it. So, okay.

So the rat is in chaos and then he builds himself a little structure of order. Then he's calm, but the chaos is still there because it never goes away. Okay, now I said already rats don't live in isolation. They live in complex social groups. I made some reference to this in 12 rules for life. In the first rule, stand up straight with your shoulders back when I was talking about hierarchies. And I was talking about hierarchies for a reason. It wasn't to justify, first of all, it wasn't to prove they were inevitable. That chapter has been criticized a lot by the people who have gone after me in the press,

let's say. Peterson is justifying the patriarchy or justifying the hierarchy. It's like, number one, noticing something exists is not the same as justifying it. Okay, so that's important. Now, so I notice that hierarchy is exist. Now, you wouldn't think that'd be too much of a problem since it's also the proclivity of the left wing radicals that have gone after me, to also notice that hierarchies exist. In fact, that's all they do.

They just spend all their time noticing that hierarchies exist. Now, they have a problem. Okay, so they have a problem. They think that hierarchies oppress and dispossess. That's true. They do. One of the reasons that I wrote the first chapter was because, let's say you are a compassionate person, and you're also a good person.

Those are not the same thing. Just because you feel sorry for someone does not mean you're good. Good is way harder than just feeling sorry for someone. So if you're running around patting yourself on the back Because you feel sorry for people you're like 1% of the way to be in a good person. That's it. So And it's partly because it's partly because feeling sorry for people can actually be really damaging to them Like if you feel too sorry for people if you treat them like they're too fragile and overprotect

them, you do them a terrible disservice. That's especially true if they happen to be your children. So not only are you not a good person if you're just because you're compassionate, you might be a bad person because you're too compassionate. That happens a lot. I noticed in my clinical practice, for example, no client I ever had came and told me, I need to see a psychologist because my parents made me too independent.

That never happened. Right, it never happened, but the reverse happened a lot. You know, I can't get away from the stifling milieu of my family. Right, that happened a lot and it's crushing. So, all right. So, back to hierarchies. Rat-slave and hierarchies. It's an important observation that rats-slave and hierarchies. Because the radical leftists, for example, who are upset about the fact that hierarchies exist and dispossessed people

and that they produce unequal distribution of resources, they have a point. But they're not very serious about what they're doing. That's the thing. That's what bothers me because it actually is a big problem that hierarchies dispossess and oppress people. It's a really big problem. But it's a way bigger problem than the people who are using that argument to speak for the dispossess are willing to admit.

You take Karl Marx, for example. Please. To use an old joke. He believed that you could place the existence of hierarchies that dispossess and oppress at the feet of the West and capitalism. Okay, you can't. Unquestionably, that's wrong, and it's wrong in an extraordinarily dangerous way, because even if you're concerned about the dispossessed, because you're a compassionate and you're good,

if you think that hierarchical structures exist, because of the West and capitalism, you're not gonna solve the problem that you set out to solve, because hierarchies are way worse problem than the mere West and capitalism. Otherwise animals wouldn't live in hierarchies. Chimps live in hierarchies, wolves live in hierarchies, dogs live in hierarchies, rats live in hierarchies, birds live in hierarchies, lobsters live in hierarchies.

Right. Okay. So why did I pick lobsters? Now they've haunted me. I'm going to be haunted by lobsters for the rest of my life. Why did I pick lobsters? Well, for a couple of reasons. First of all, we diverged from our common ancestor with crustaceans 350 million years ago. So the fact that they live in hierarchies like we do means that hierarchies have been around for 350 million years. That's older than trees. It's older than flowers. It's old. hierarchies are a permanent structure of the of reality. That's order. That's the yang part of yin and yang. It's permanent and it's so permanent,

and this is another reason that I use lobsters, is that your nervous system is not only adapted to hierarchies. It's adapted to hierarchies as if there's hardly anything else that's more real. So here's an example. So your emotional stability is dependent at least in part on the efficiency with which you're the lower parts of your brain, the ancient parts of your brain produce the neurochemical serotonin, and if you produce enough serotonin, then your negative emotions stay pretty nicely under control. So it's like it's like you're also not too impulsive on the positive emotion front, but more importantly, you're not in too much emotional pain, you're not too much disgusted, and you're not terrified out of your skull. And so it's

actually really important to you that your serotonin levels stay high. It's like more important than anything else, and here's the rub. So part of the way that your brain determines how much serotonin to produce is by looking at where you fit in the hierarchy, and the higher you are up in the hierarchy, the more serotonin you produce. And the reason for that is that your brain assumes that if you're high up in the hierarchy, you have lots of friends and you have a pretty comfortable

place to live and you have lots of opportunities in front of you and you have resources to draw on if things go to hell. And so it's okay that you're not terrified out of your skull. But if you're at the bottom of the hierarchy and you don't have any skills and you don of the hierarchy, and you don't have any skills, and you don't have any employment, and you don't have any friends, and everything's uncertain as hell, then your serotonin levels plummet, and you're overcome by anxiety and terror.

And you think, well, and it's worse than that, because if you're overcome by anxiety and terror, and you don't get a lot of positive motion out of that, by the way, if you're overcome by anxiety and terror, you produce a tremendous amount of the stress hormone cortisol, and then you die faster. Because cortisol makes you age more quickly. And the reason it does that, essentially, is, like, if you're in an emergency, which you are, if you're at the bottom of the hierarchy, because you're like one slip from disaster when you live there all the time, then your brain assumes that you better bloody well be prepared

for whatever the hell is going to happen next. And so it cranks up the cortisol levels and that puts everything that you are on edge for emergency action. And that can be exhilarating in small doses, like that's why people go in a roller coaster, but as a way of life, it makes you old. It literally, that's what it does.

It steals resources from your future and burns them up in the present. And so high levels of cortisol increase your probability of cancer and heart disease and diabetes and Alzheimer's and obesity. Like you name it, you just have to, and suppresses your immune system because who cares if you die of the flu? And two weeks if there's a tiger chasing you around a tree right now, right? Well, that's exactly it. So, so not only do hierarchies exist,

you can't attribute them to the vagaries of some socioeconomic structure like the West and capitalism. And they're so old that your brain is adapted to them like they're a fundamental element of reality. And so the Marxist critique, the best way to critique, the Marxist critique, isn't from the right wing. You just say, yeah, yeah. You're right.

Hierarchies oppress and dispossess. But you're wrong about the fact that there is secondary consequence of capitalism. They're not. Period. You're wrong. And if you want to solve the problem of dispossession instead of just acting like you're one of the people who want to solve the problems of dispossession, which is an entirely different thing, then you might want to get a hell of a lot more serious about the problem. And that's part of the reason that I wrote

the first chapter was to make the claim. It's like, no, this is a way worse problem than you think. Now, I made a secondary claim, which is also an anti-Marxist claim, because the identity politics Marxist types also have this other idea, which is, well well there's a hierarchy and it's a consequence of the pathological structure of the west and it's basically a tyranny and the way you move up it is by exercising power because all hierarchies are based on power. It's like no they're not. That's also wrong. A corrupt hierarchy is based on power,

but a functional hierarchy is based on competence. And you know that. Take the hierarchy of plumbers, for example. So most of us presume that it's useful to have plumbers. We don't think of roving bands of plumbers oppressing us with the necessity for plumbing. And we don't think of roving bands of plumbers oppressing us with the necessity for plumbing. And we don't think that the best plumber is the one who's beat the most other plumbers to death with a lead pipe. Right, we assume that the best plumber is someone

who stops sewage from leaking in your house at a low cost, and who's pretty decent at managing his time or her time and business affairs, right? And that's how you hire a plumber. You don't have plumbers come to your door and threaten you with what will happen if you don't hire them. Well, it's funny, but it's not funny because we have this this pervasive propaganda in our culture that fundamentally what we've created is something like a tyranny, but if you break it down into its elements, it's the absurdity of that just manifests itself right away.

The tyranny of emergency room nurses. There's another one. Or people who work in palliative care. Or massage therapists. There's another terrible power hierarchy. Right? Or elementary school teachers, right? And even lawyers, you know, even lawyers are fun, sorry, I know some of you are lawyers, and that's okay. It isn't the most tyrannical lawyers that rise to the top. It's actually the lawyers who are best at generating business for their law firm. It's the lawyers who are competent and there's lawyers, but who can also work effectively as

entrepreneurial agents and who bring in business to their law firms and who feed the lawyers in the law firms who are competent but can't generate business. Those are the people that rise to the top. And if they're a bit psychopathic, you know, if an organization, because another alternative root to the top is to be a bit of a psychopath and to use power, there's a very ineffective route. You have to keep moving around because people don't, people figure you out fairly soon. And so you have to keep moving around and finding new suckers, because if you stay in one place in your psychopath, people figure out, figure out pretty soon and they put a box

around you and they just stay the hell away from you. And so the idea, A, that what we live in is tyrannical patriarchy is an absolute. It's something that has the vaguest ghosts of truth that's being worshipped as an unalterable axiom. The hierarchies we have contend towards corruption, right? And corruption by power, that's partly why we have elections, you know, if someone's in power for like 15 years, I think the reason democracy works in part is to rotate between right and left.

But even more importantly, it's just to throw people out. Well, seriously, I'm getting serious about this. It's like, it takes a while to get a hierarchy, so entrenched that it can start to become corrupt. Maybe that takes four years. Maybe it takes eight years because those are kind of the terms we allow people, right? Four years, eight years, something like that in power. It's like, okay, you had your eight years, throw you out, throw this pack of idiots out, bring in a new pack of idiots. No improvement. No improvement.

But less entrenched corruption. Right. Friends corruption, right? Applause So back to the hierarchy. There's no getting away from hierarchies. Okay, so why? Well, there's a bunch of reasons. I told you that I'd been talking to Sam Harris about this and about belief systems. So now I want to talk about the relationship between belief systems and hierarchies, because I actually don't think they're any different.

I think they're the same thing. So here's why. This is also relevant to the chaos and order issue. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of the world out there. There's a lot of the world, and there are a lot of facts about the world. There's more of the world than you can see, and there's more of the world than you could even

hypothetically see. And there are more facts about the world than you could ever possibly process. So things are complex beyond imagining. And everyone knows that. And that's chaos. Now, it's useful because the fact that things are complex beyond imagining is also the same thing

as saying there is potential beyond imagining. So the downside of the complexity is it's just too much. But the upside is, hey, there's more out there than you know about, and you can mine that. You can, you know, and you know what you do, you do that when you go develop skills, you go develop your skills, get more educated, or you set yourself a new challenge, right?

You're out there mining potential, you're out there in the complexity mining potential. That's why, by the way, that you find gold if you go find the dragon. It's exactly the same idea. The dragon is this complex symbol of complexity that lurks in the darkness, the same thing that will devour the rat, but there's possibility out there. So if you go out there, you get the possibility.

So that's the chaotic domain. Because there's so much out there, and there's so many things to attend to. It's very hard to figure out what to do. And that's actually what we have to do as living creatures. We can't just see things. We have to do things about them. And here's the rub. You can only do one thing at a time. This is one of the very, very strange things about consciousness. If you try to write and watch a video at the same time, you're not doing that. What you're doing is you're writing a bit,

and then you're watching a bit, then you're writing a bit, then you're watching a bit. You only have one motor output system. It's kind of strange, actually, that that's the case. Your consciousness is an unbelievably narrow channel. People have estimated it's bandwidth at four bits, right, which is like a really bad modem from 1950, when there weren't even modems. The bandwidth of your consciousness is unbelievably narrow. And the reason for that seems to be that you have to take all of everything that

there is, and you have to turn it into the one thing that you have to take all of everything that there is, and you have to turn it into the one thing that you're doing. And you do that in action, because you can only do one thing at a time, but you also do it in perception, because you can actually only look at one thing at a time, or hear one thing at a time. It's a little more complicated than that, but not much. Compared to all the things you could be seeing and hearing you're hardly seeing and hearing everything, anything.

And there's lots of experiments that have shown this. So, for example, change blindness experiments, for example, that show that, you know, the way of visual, you kind of have a sense that you see a broad visual landscape. But you don't, you're laser beaming it constantly by moving your eyes around. And then you build a picture out of these little laser beam

points, and your eyes are just moving around like mad, partly voluntarily. You can control that, but partly involuntarily. So it's pin points of light make up the visual image. And you can tell that, too. You can actually see this if you pay attention to it. So for example, if I look at you, I can see your face and your eyes.

But the two ladies beside you, I can see your face and your eyes, but the two ladies beside you, I can tell they're women, I think you're a man and I think you're a woman. And I can't tell, and out here, I know you're people, but you're basically just vague blurs. I know you're people because I already looked there, but otherwise vague blurs. You people over there, you're just all mashed together, and you're basically black and white, even though I can't tell that. So my central vision is very, very focused and detailed, but the peripheral vision is hardly there at all.

And the way you overcome that is by looking around all the time. And so, here's the complex problem that you have to solve, that you're solving every second of your life. This is what you use your belief systems for. You're using your belief system to take everything that's in the world, that chaos, that chaotic potential, and to turn it to one thing. So you have to think about that, so hard,

you have to filter out everything except one thing. Here's something interesting, you might be interested in. I spent a lot of time investigating neuropsychopharmacology, the way the brain responds to chemicals, essentially. And one of, I was very interested in drug and alcohol abuse. I did my PhD thesis on alcoholism, studied a lot about the way that various drugs of abuse work. Hallucinogens, one of the things Hallucinogens do,

is stop you from reducing everything to one thing. That's why people have this sense of being flooded by, say, infinite potential, or sometimes hell, but infinite potential. What the chemical, the chemicals that make up Hallucinogens, the classical hallucinogens, interfere with serotonergic function, that's one of the things they do.

And they stop this gating from occurring. And so they open, as Huxley pointed out, they open the doors of perception, and they let you see far more of what's there than you would normally perceive at quite a cost, right? That cost of potentially being overwhelmed, and also the cost of not being able to act well that's happening and so that can be a wonderful mystical experience But you could be eaten by a lion when you're not able to organize running away So it's actually very practically useful in order to reduce things to one thing. So then the question is You've got all those things to reduce to one thing how the hell do you do it?

Because it's really really complicated because there's all that things to reduce to one thing. How the hell do you do it? Because it's really, really complicated. Because there's all that material to take care of. And the answer to this, this is what I really wanted to concentrate on tonight. Because I'm just starting to get this right, is you do it both collectively and neurologically at the same time. So I think of, I don't know how many of you have ever started a business, but if you start a business and you produce a new product, one of the most difficult decisions that you have to make is how much to charge for your product. Now obviously you have to

charge more than it costs to make it. So that's where you start, but you can't tell after that. It's like, well, is it a premium product? Should you charge 100 times what it costs to make it? Or maybe a thousand times because maybe people only want to buy it because it's a luxury item, or should you make it as cheap as possible so that many, many people buy it? But you don't want to make it too cheap because if you make it too cheap, then people will think it's cheap and then they won't buy it. And so it's really hard to make a pricing decision

because what is something worse? And the answer is, that question really is, what's this thing worth compared to everything else that's worth something? And there's a lot of other things that are worth something. There's an almost infinite number of them. That's actually why the free market works and why it's a necessity is because the only way you can decide what everything is worth is by letting everyone vote on it. So you have all that brain power, that distributed brain power.

It's like externalized computation. You say, well, let's just let everybody compete about what things are worth, and we'll watch where it settles, because otherwise we'll have to compute that ourselves, and we can't. The central Soviet in its heyday had to make 10,000 pricing decisions a day. So they couldn't even calculate what a nail is worth. Like what's a nail worth? Well if you have to nail something together, it's worth quite a lot.

Right? You know what I mean? It's like a nail can be worth a lot. So what's a nail worth? Well, there's no answer to that because the question is, isn't what a nail is worth? The question is, what is a nailworth in comparison to everything else that's worth something? It's like, well, good luck computing that. You can't. It's technically not possible. That's partly why we have a stock market. It's like, what's a stock worth? Well, it's

what everybody will pay for, given that they could also buy any other stock. And how do we compute that? We let tens of millions of people vote. And even that sometimes goes completely astray because sometimes the stock market, you know, it has a bubble and then it crashes. And it's just an indication of how difficult it is to price everything. And you think, well, why is he rambling on about pricing? It's like it's a subset of the problem of valuing. And to value things is to put them

in a hierarchy, right? To order them in terms of their worth. And you have to do that in order to be able to see, because you can't see anything unless you focus on one thing and not on everything else. So in order to see, you have to value things. And in order to value things, you have to put them in a hierarchy. And in order to put them in a hierarchy, you have to let everyone participate. Because otherwise, you're not smart enough to put them in a hierarchy. And so that's partly what we're doing in our culture is that we're engaged in this competitive and cooperative enterprise that helps us collectively determine what everything is comparatively worth. And you think, well, that why is that so useful?

Well, it simplifies things. What should you pay attention to? Not everything. You know that, a day you're trying to pay attention to everything, you just don't get anything done. If you pay attention to everything, you don't get anything done. So what you have to do is you have to prioritize

and by prioritizing, you're reducing everything to zero except the one thing you're concentrating on. And that's an insanely, insanely complicated act. You wouldn't have to have a brain if that wasn't so hard, and you have a hell of a brain, you know, it is the most complicated thing in the cosmos. By orders of magnitude, it's massively complicated. It's so full of connections that it's a number of patterns of connections in your brain, far supersedes any cosmological number. You are super complicated. And the reason for that is it's really hard to take everything there is and turn it into the one thing that you should do. And then well, the question is, well, how do you answer the question, what should you do?

And the answer is, well, you partly want to do what others, you partly want to do what other people think is worthwhile. Do you want to have something to trade? If you're doing something that no one else thinks is worthwhile, well, first of all, you're probably going to die because the probability that it's useful, if no one else thinks it's useful, is like zero, or not completely zero, sometimes you're a stellar genius, but hardly ever. Most of the time you're just deluded.

So, right, but now and then you're a stellar genius, so that's a problem. But in any case, you should pay attention to what everyone else values, because if you pay attention to what everyone else values and you master it, then you have something to trade with everyone else, and they value you. And so that's a good deal. And so this is how it works. And we have a hierarchical organization in our society. It consists of people cooperating and competing

in the attempt to produce value. And you need to produce value because we need valuable things, otherwise we die, and we need to produce value because we need to specify what it is that we need to do. And so we have hierarchies that do the specification. And you incorporate that hierarchy, that's the perceptual structure that mediates between you and the world.

So, because what you end up doing is paying attention to the things that are of value. And the question, what is of value is something that's, that's, decided upon collectively. And so your perceptual systems are dependent on the integrity of the hierarchy. And then your psychological stability is dependent on the match between the hierarchy that you've internalized and the hierarchy that exists outside.

So if you have an internalized set of values, it's hierarchical in structure, and you're acting on that, and it's the same structure that everyone else is acting on, then the valuable things that you pursue will be valued by other people, then you can live with other people. And so part of the reason that we need to support our belief systems back to that original problem is because they actually do protect us from chaos. Your belief system isn't just your belief system. Your belief system is the system that you use to simplify the world so that you can act in such a manner that it exists

in correspondence with the way everyone else is doing that simultaneously, at least within your cultural sphere. So part of the reason you're also happy about supporting your own cultural value system is because you have a value system, and so does your culture, and they match. And so if your cultural value system gets flipped upside down, then your perceptual value system no longer works, then you can't function, then the chaos of the world comes in and overwhelms you, then you're terrified out of your skull, and you die. And so it's not surprising that people value their belief systems. So that's all extraordinarily useful to know, as far as I'm concerned. And so, and... Now, the problem is, there's a couple of problems here. One problem, which we're not going to be able to address to any great degree tonight, is the fact that despite the fact that you have to have the hierarchy, because you have to have the value system,

because it has to specify so that you can act and so that you can act with other people, there's no getting away from that. It's absolutely necessary. Hierarchies do dispossess people. Because what happens, I wrote about this in 12 rules for life too, is that once you set up a hierarchy, like the number of good plumbers is far outweighed by the number of terrible plumbers. The number of good lawyers is far outweighed by the number of terrible lawyers, and it's true in every single domain, and it's viciously true. It's governed by a law, prices law. Prices law is a terrible law, but it looks like a law.

It governs the size of cities. It governs the size of stars. It governs the height of trees in the rainforest. It's another one of these laws that isn't specifically, it isn't specific to human endeavor. That which has gets more. Bigger stars accrete more mass because they have more gravitational pull.

So they just get bigger and bigger. And bigger cities are more attractive because they produce more opportunity. So they get bigger and bigger. And so taller trees get more light so they get taller and taller. Skillful people get more and more opportunities. And so they get more and more skillful. That's what happens. Rich people, because they have money, have more and more opportunities to make more money,

so they make more money. You know the 1% you hear about that all the time. You're all in the 1% by the way. By world standards, you're in the 1%. By historical standards, you're probably in the 1 1,000th of 1 percent. So that's a good thing to know if you're feeling poor. You're not that poor, man. So you know you hear a lot about the 1 percent.

But what you don't hear is that it's an iron law of hierarchy. And it doesn't matter what the hierarchy is, it produces exactly that distribution. Hardly anyone ends up with everything. 12 richest people in the world have as much money as the bottom two and a half billion. Think, oh my god, that's terrible. It's a terrible cataclysmic consequence of the capitalist system.

It's, no, it's not. And one of the things that's really interesting about capitalism in the West is that every system produces unbelievable inequality and a lot of misery and grief. And the West has figured out how to produce inequality and some wealth, right? So the inequality, that's a catastrophe. Good luck sorting it out.

The wealth, that's a bloody miracle. That's absolutely unbelievable because the rule for all of human history was plenty of inequality, no shortage of starvation and misery, and a little bit of luxury for the tiny set of people who are at the top. And for the last 150 years, not much more than that, the bottom bottom is being lifted up at an absolutely unbelievable rate. So we produce inequality, but thank God we produce wealth at the same time, and we're kicking the hell out of absolute poverty. You know, the number of people in absolute poverty in the world by the UN definition of absolute poverty fell by half between 2000 and 2015, 2012, sorry, that one of the UN Millennium

goals was to have the number of people in absolute poverty before, by the year 2015, we did that three years early, right? It was the fastest growth in wealth and human history, by a huge margin. And the same thing is happening on an unbelievably immense scale. You know that child mortality rates in Africa are now the same as they were in Europe in 1950. It's absolutely beyond belief.

Plumming maternal death rates in child birth everywhere around the world. Plumming family size, we're going to peak out at about 9.5 billion, we can probably handle that. And then there's going to be a precipitous decline in human population. That's well projected out into the next 75 years. There are more forests in the north hemisphere than there were 100 years ago. People are getting access to fresh water and plumbing and electricity and unbelievably potent computational devices at a rate that is absolutely beyond comprehension.

I don't think you could speed it up if you tried. The fastest growing economies in the world are in sub-Saharan Africa. It's like this system that we've put together, which is based at least on the production of competent hierarchies is producing an increment in a decrement in absolute poverty at a rate that's absolutely staggering. And people don't know it. And most of this has been happening in the last 20 years. So it's something to be extraordinarily grateful for. And it's something as well for us to wake up about. We need to be smarter about these things. It is still the case that hierarchical structures dispossess because of prices law.

So here's prices law. It's a terrible law. The square root of the number of people who engage in an activity do have to work. So if you have ten artists, three of them paint half the paintings. But if you have a hundred artists, ten of them paint half the paintings. But if you have 100 artists, 10 of them paint half the paintings, and if there's 1,000 of them, then 30 of them paint half the paintings. And so as the domain of product, as the domain, as the size of the group, engage in the productive activity, increases the proportion of people who are doing the bulk of the productive labor decreases.

And as I said, this law seems to apply across categories, not just human categories, reproductive categories for that matter. So it's the rule, rather it's the rule. And that's a real problem. And so, now close with this, I think part of the reason that we have a left wing and a right wing in our political discussion is because the right wing is always saying, Ra Ra for the hierarchy and fair enough, man, especially if the hierarchy is based on competence because those hierarchies are hard to come by and they stabilize our societies

and they allow for productivity and they allow you to perceive the world and they allow you to act and they allow you to exist in the absence of abject terror. That's a lot. But the price we pay for hierarchies is the dispossession of the majority of abject terror, that's a lot. But the price we pay for hierarchies is the dispossession of the majority of people. Now, we solve that in some ways by producing a lot of different hierarchies. So, if you're not good at one thing, there's something else you can be good at. But there are people who just don't manage it across the entire set of hierarchies, and that's pretty rough. And the proper voice of the left is to speak on behalf

of the people who are unfairly dispossessed by the hierarchy. But not at the cost of tearing the whole damn thing down, right? Not at the cost of, of, of a lack of understanding, first of all, the depth of problem, but, but also as a consequence of sheer ingratitude, it would be very foolish thing for us to tear down the machinery that we've built, that

is accomplishing all the great things, that it is accomplishing because it produces inequality, because we don't know how to make productive machines that don't produce inequality. No one knows how to do that. Now that doesn't mean we don't have a responsibility to do something to ameliorate the inequality, you know. And maybe that's a personal responsibility issue. If you happen to be fortunate, let's say, skillful, productive, and lucky, because luck plays into it.

Then maybe you have a moral obligation to do what you can to try to make the world a better place, which is something that I tried to stress into all rules for life, also trying to make the case. And I'll close with this. Two cases. First case. The best way to move up a competency hierarchy,

or more importantly, imagine there's a set of competency hierarchies. And what you wanna do is you wanna figure out how you could act so that the probability that you would be successful across that whole set of hierarchies is maximized. That's the issue of ethics. That's the way out of moral relativism. Say, the ethic that we've, that's emerged, I would say, that's well articulated in Western philosophy, Western theology for that matter, is the idea that there's a mode of ethical being that maximizes the probability that you'll be successful in the most successful way across the set

of all possible hierarchies of confidence. And that's actually associated with what we would classically think about as being a good person. The most relevant part of that is probably being a responsible person. And one of the things that I've made a case for in 12 rules for life, for example, is that and this goes back to the beginning of the lecture, because life is characterized by vulnerability and mortality, suffering, all of that, you need a meaning to offset that.

It has to have practical utility, because you don't want to starve to death, but it has to have psychological utility so that you can bear your existence despite its fragility. And the most effective way of developing both of those appears to be to take responsibility, say, well, and it's this facing, it's the same facing thing again. It's like life is characterized by suffering. What do you do about that? You face it as if you could and you take responsibility for it as if you could and in that responsibility you find the meaning that allows you to deal with the suffering practically speaking because you get better at it but also to triumph over it because you've got something worth doing. And that's responsibility. That's also the message that goes throughout the book, but is exemplified particularly in chapter one, because the reason

that I suggested to people is that they stand up straight with their shoulders back isn't to adopt a position of tyrannical, patriarchal power, but to orient themselves physically so that you confront the world and its complexity and its suffering as courageously as possible, which is what you do when you open yourself up to the world. It's not a defensive posture, it's not defeated. It's a posture of voluntary confrontation or a posture of moral courage or a posture of responsibility. And, well, there isn't a better way of dealing with things.

There isn't a better way of pushing back the suffering and malevolence of the world. And there isn't a better way of being successful in functional hierarchies. And so, from the knowledge of the hierarchy and its existence, you can understand perception, you can understand the role of perception in determining action, you can understand the role of perception in action in regulating emotions, and you can derive an ethic. And all of that, as far as I'm concerned, is what founded on a firm foundation, on a rock, not on sand. It's a reflection of the reality of the world.

So, thank you very much. I'm gonna trade with you there so I can have this thing. Isn't that cool? You were feeling it tonight, huh? I can tell on the nights when you're feeling it. They're feeling it tonight, too. It's enthusiastic, Calgaryens. Yeah. Basket of deplorables.

You're gonna think. All right, we got a lot of good questions here. This one's actually just a statement, but I think it sums up a lot of what we've seen here in Canada. Please run for Prime Minister. I'm sorry, Bucco. Well, thank you. Thank you for the encouragement. I appreciate that. You know I come from the same town as Rachel Nothby, eh?

Well, she was a friend of mine when I was a kid. We knew each other really well. So I knew her parents very well, too. Grant not be used to run the NDP. And he was the only opposition member of parliament in Alberta for like 20 years. It was ridiculous, man. And people in, in

Fairview didn't vote for him because he was a socialist, even though he was a good sort of socialist. He was one of the people who actually did try to speak on behalf of the working class. And the working class needs a political voice. I thought about a political career. I've thought about a political career many times in my life, but every time I've seriously considered it, I had other opportunities that were in front of me that seemed to be more, I wouldn't say pressing because there's plenty that's pressing about a political

career, but that seemed more, what's the right word? The priorities, they seem to take priority and that hasn't stopped, you know. Like I thought about it a while ago again, when all this started to emerge and I'm doing all these tours and I have some more books to write and it just seems to me that that's better. It's better for me to do that. So I think plus I don't speak French, that's a problem. Most of you Albertans know about that problem. So getting Albertans to speak French is like hurting cats.

Doesn't work. So. So, yeah. So, what you're saying is you're running. Can you please say the following words? This is Kermit the Frog reporting from Sesame Street. Go to hell. What advice? What did you say last night?

We were talking about the bloody muppets and you said, at least he's top frog. So that's something. There's a Pepe joke here, but I don't want anyone recording this. What advice would you give newlyweds? Fight. Vote everything. I really mean that, man.

There's things to fight about. Nothing's too small, because you've got things to sort out. You know, I hear so many people, so many people have come to me, and I'm getting old, so I've seen a lot of this. We never fight. It's like, that's because you're cowardly. But you got nothing to fight about, really? You're not going to fight about how to split up the household finances, eh?

You're not going to fight about that. That's not worth fighting, but you're just going to be bitter and resentful about it for 30 years, right? You're not going to fight about who's responsible for the domestic duties. You're just going to have every goddamn meal time when people have to clean up, be miserable because no one sorted it out. That's going to be the solution, right? You're not going to fight about sex. You're just going to be deprived or overloaded. You're not going to fight about how to discipline your kids because

obviously you got that all taken care of and it's not complicated in the least. It's like, you're not going to fight about whose career takes priority under what conditions. You're not going to fight about vacations, right? You're not going to fight about how you treat each other when you come home after a long day. You're not going to fight about how you treat each other when you go out to a party and where the boundaries of respect are. You're not going to fight about flirting. You're not going to fight about how attractive you should look when you go out in public. No, it's a fight, it's a fight, man. It's a fight. Like, look, if you're good at it, if you're good at it, which you aren't, if you're good at it, then it can transform into the kind of negotiation

where you're both sitting there relatively peacefully, relatively well controlled, discussing the issues rationally. It's like you have to bloody well-being, unbelievably sophisticated to manage that. It's really, really, really hard. Partly because you have to bloody well be unbelievably sophisticated to manage that. It's really, really, really hard. Partly because you have to take the other person's side as well, which is another thing I would really also recommend to newlyweds is like, don't be thinking that that other person isn't you.

You're stuck with them. They're you. And so if they make a bad argument about something that they're upset about, you should step in and help them make the argument better. Because they might be right despite their incoherence and annoying existence. So you got lots, there's lots to straighten out. And the reason I say fight, too, is I didn't say debate. And the reason I didn't say debate is because I didn't mean debate.

I meant fight because it's really hard to do this. And you have to be willing to have conflict. And conflict is really hard on people. Like I've been in a constant state of conflict in the last two years. And it's not, I don't enjoy conflict. It makes my heart race. It wears me out. It makes me sweat. Like it leaves me often with a feeling of doom. It's not

pleasant. But it's better to have the damn conflict than to live out the catastrophe over two decades. You know, so, and as a, as a clinician, I've seen this, I've seen families. Every member of the family has their hands around at the neck of the neck of at least one other family member, and they're squeezing hard enough to choke them over 20 years. It's hideously ugly, and part of the reason for that is all the resentment that builds up because all the fights aren't out in the open. It's like it's really hard to establish peace with your partner because you're different, you're stupid, you're both stupid, you're both blind, you can't argue,

you can't talk, you can't think, and you're full of biases and me level it's like that's the situation. And it's really hard to take that and to forge peace out of it. It's unbelievably difficult, and it takes conflict. It takes hitting yourself up against each other. And that's actually something that produces a certain amount of dynamism in the relationship, and it requires truth. It's like, so if you're not happy and you won't be,

if you're not happy with your partner, if you're not happy with something they've done, you have to say so. And, but you with something they've done, you have to say so. But you have to say so carefully, you have to say, I'm not happy with this thing that happened. You try to make it the smallest thing you can. You don't go after the person's throat, right? First move. Smallest thing possible.

And you say, it might be me. I might be stupid, ignorant, and I probably am. But as far as I can tell, this is your doing. And then you look... Yeah, but you're not lying when you say that. You're not lying and you say, look, if you can... Look, if you can tell me that I'm stupid and miserable and ignorant and immature for

being unhappy and you can convince me, please do so, because if I'm wrong, I need to know so I can stop being miserable. And if you think it's me and not you, please tell me, and all listen, because if it is me, then I could stop doing it, and then we don't have to put up with this for the next 50 bloody years. Right, that's the thing you have to remember, is that you don't wanna put up with it

for the next 50 years. And so, you have to confront the other person with your unhappiness. And also, your happiness, like if they do something, if your person does something that's good, you should tell them that's an unbelievably effective technique is to watch your partner. And when they do something that you'd like them to do more of, don't punish them because that's an excellent time to punish them because it really is a great time to punish someone if you really want to hurt them

Wait till they do something good Jab them That really hurts. They'll never do that good thing again That's the price you'll pay, but it's very effective if you're looking for his inventions and if you don't think people are like that then you're not paying attention so but So you want to have that conflict and it's really unpleasant, it's really unpleasant and it'll stress your relationship.

But if you stress the relationship and then you solve the problem it'll snap back and then it'll be stronger than it was because by stressing it like that and then having it snap back because you solve the problem you actually tighten the bonds that hold you together. Whereas if you avoid the conflict, then you can live under the pretense of peace, but it's a complete bloody lie. And you never test the relationship, because you don't test it, you don't strengthen it.

And so one of the things that Carl Jung said is, men and women wouldn't have to fall in love if they could get along. LAUGHTER Right. Right. It's so smart. APPLAUSE You know, and we're different as individuals and we're different as sexes.

And so there's conflict to be had, but in that conflict, you know, it's the tempering that tempers you and it turns you into a better person. But you have to engage in it and that takes courage and that's what I would say if you're newlyweds. Tell each other the truth, tell each other the truth, right? Don't use it as a weapon because that's not the truth. Tell your partner the truth, whatever it is, all the awful truth, and see if you can

forge a relationship out of that truth, and then you'll have something that will last you through the trials and tribulations of life. You'll have the foundation, you'll have laid the foundation so that you can raise children in security and with a certain amount of pleasure and you'll be there for each other and you'll have someone to tie the story of your life together with the story of their life and to make a rope that's much stronger and thicker as a consequence of that. That's all dependent on telling the truth to your partner and having the courage to engage in the conflict that that that will produce.

So, and don't say we never fight. It's like, Christ, there's things to fight about, you know, life is really hard. And so, even when you're trying to make a decision about something, there has to be some combat about that. I was reading the other day, this book called The Master and his Emissary, and it's about how the right and left hemisphere work together, and it's about how the right and left hemisphere work together, and they work in conflict with each other. It's partly what you have two hemispheres.

If you want to make a really fine adjustment with your hand, like, let's say, you have to move it very slowly to make a fine adjustment. The best way to do that is to take your other hand and push against it, and then move finally. You can do it with a lot more control. And so to make really fine adjustments in things, you need to have terrible tension. You have to be pushing against each other. And to make the fine judgments that you have to make,

for example, when you're figuring out how to discipline children, which is unbelievably complicated thing to do, you need that tension and that pressure. And that way you can make fine adjustments and fine movements. And but it requires the ability to tolerate that conflict. So, there, that's what I would tell New Year's. Applause Does Canada need to build a wall to keep out the Americans? Well, then we wouldn't have Dave. What the hell would we do with Dave?

What do you like most and dislike most about living in Canada? like most about living in Canada. What do I like most? Well, it's a pretty good country. I mean, you know, things work pretty well here, so Toronto, I won't talk about Toronto too much because you're all a burden. I moved there much to my chagrin. And you know, it works pretty well. It's a pretty good city. And this is a pretty good country.

Where the hell else would you live? I mean, it's too damn cold in the winter, obviously. But it keeps the poison of snakes down mostly. So that's a plus. And we've got a pretty good here. We've got a nice combination of opportunity and stability. And we have good solid democratic institutions, and we have every reason to be thrilled out of our skull for being here, and so I'm very grateful for that.

What are I dislike about it? I don't like Bill C-16, I'm not that tall. What's the best advice you can give a young man dealing with an addiction? Well, I have this program online called the Future Authoring Program. I would say you should go do that. And there's two parts, there's three parts of it, so I'll just outline the parts really quickly. In the first part, you answer seven questions about how you would like your life to be if you could have the life that you would choose if you were being good to yourself.

Like you took care of yourself. What do you want from your family, your friends, your career, how you can educate yourself, take care of yourself physically and mentally, regulate your use of drugs and alcohol, and make productive and meaningful use of your time outside work. Three to five years down the road. You can have what you want, but you have to specify it. That's like rule 10, be precise in your speech. You won't hit a target unless you specify it. You won't hit a target unless you aim at it. So let's assume that you could have what you needed, but you have to say what it is. So you answer those questions. Then you write for 15 minutes about what your life could be like three to five years down the road if it was put in. If you could have what you would, what would, what would appear

to you using the best of your judgment to be a life that would justify its tragedy, let's say. That's the first part. The second part, right for 15 minutes, about what your life will be like. If you let all your weakness of character and your susceptibility to temptation and to error fully manifest itself and take you out. So that's like you write a little description of the promised land, a little description of hell. And then you have every reason to walk up hell towards the promised land and every reason to run the hell away from hell.

And if you're wrestling with addiction, partly what you're not doing is you're not thinking it through. Because no matter how bad it is now, it's nowhere near as bad as it's going to get. And so that's a pit, it's not going to only take you, it's going to take you and your family. And it's going to take everything that you could have offered to the community. And it's going to take everything that you could have offered to the community. And it's going to tear you into bits. And it's going to do it in its own particular, pernicious way. And it's a way you already know. And if you write all that down, and you've got to let your imagination run,

you've got to think, OK, like, let's drop the lies for a minute, often associated with addiction, by the way, because what happens, here's a fun little story. So you know, there's this idea that if you're a heroin addict, you have a monkey on your back. Here's how that monkey works. So drugs of abuse like cocaine and heroin, methamphetamines, alcohol for people who are susceptible to alcohol are technically dopamine

allergic agonists and dopamine is the neurochemical that produces hope and interest and excitement enthusiasm pleasure all of those things that's all dopamineurgically mediated so if you take a chemical that spikes your dopamine levels up especially suddenly which is why snorting works better than ingesting and injecting works even better than snorting, suddenly then you flood the dopaminergic systems and it'll produce this ecstatic feeling. Okay, so now, so that's why people take cocaine. It's no mystery way we take cocaine. The mystery is that we don't all take it all the time

and do nothing else. I'm telling you the truth. That is the biochemical mystery. It's not obvious why people won't just do that all the time. So, but they don't. And so, let's say that you're experimenting with cocaine. And that works pretty well for a while, but then you start to pay a price with the crashes.

And then you notice that you need more and more cocaine to get the same effect, because you're developing tolerance and the crashes are getting worse. And you need the cocaine to get you through the crashes. And so then you start to, you start lighty yourself. So you know that you shouldn't do it. And then you come up with a bunch of reasons why it's okay just this once Then you take the cocaine

Okay, so what's the problem with that? Well dopamine does two things makes you feel good and Then so imagine that there's a chain of neurological events that occur leading up to you using the cocaine Now imagine that your brain wants to build more structures that help you act in a way that makes good things happen. So then imagine that when a good thing happens you get a dopamine kick and so your brain thinks that taking cocaine is one of those things. Then the neurological structures that underlie the actions that you took just before the dopamine hit get made stronger.

They grow. They grow. Literally. It's like watering a plant. But this is an awful, it's a weed, it's a black weed, because it's made out of lies. And it's made out of the lies that you tell yourself so that you can justify continuing down that path. Every time you hit that weed, that octopus of lies grows a little bit,

and then it grows a little bit. And as it grows, it's like a tumor in some sense. It grows and it has the capacity to suppress everything else because you can only do one thing at a time and so when you're locked onto something, then the thing that locks you onto, it suppresses everything else that you could be attended to. So you're basically, you keep it up. You're building a monster inside your head, a one-eyed monster, and all it wants is the drug and it's alive. And every time

you hit it, it grows. And then it's even worse than that, because let's say you stop for a while. You take the person and you put them in a treatment center and they get over their physiological addiction. They're no longer addicted. You take them out of the treatment center and they go back to their friends and as soon as they see their friends they get a cute craving and Up pops the monster again and they're right back at it and so well If you're addicted, that's where you're headed. So what do you need to get out of that?

Well, the first thing you need to know is you need to You need to get really clear with yourself about exactly where you're headed. And hopefully that will terrify you. And it has to terrify you. Not like death. That's terrible. There's worse things than death. Hell is worse than death. And that's what you're playing with. And then so you need that, because otherwise you won't be scared enough to stop. But you also need the other, you need to think, well, what could your life be if you weren't

toying with this foolishness? What, how would you need to live in order to justify a life without the drug? Because if you're addicted, you're probably susceptible to the drug. Most alcoholics get a really good opiate kick out of alcohol and so alcohol is a really effective drug for them. That's why they become alcoholic.

You need a life that's more worth living than the drug. And so you've got to think about what a life like that would look like, it's like, well, what do you need to do? What would you need to do with your life that would be sufficiently rich and meaningful so that it would be worth not using the drug anymore, no apart from avoiding the help. And so you need to think that through. And it has to be real. So that's the situation that you're in. I would also say, well, that's, I don't know of anything else you can do that's more effective than that.

Figure out what the alternative is and come clean with yourself about where you're headed. See if that's really what you want. So. All right, unfortunately, only a time for one more. I like this one. What do you make of your newfound fame? Well, part of it, I think part of it's a consequence of a revolution in technology. You know, it's been hard to figure out what to make of it. And you don't want to, whenever something happens to you,

you want to parse it out into causes. And the first thing you do is look for situational causes, rather than personal causes. It's the appropriate way to think things through. And so I've been thinking about this. And part of what's happened to me is that I'm an early adopter of an unbelievably powerful technology.

So and the technology, there's two, the technology's twofold. Video on demand with no bandwidth restrictions. Same thing you're benefiting from. You and Rogan and other people who are doing these long-form discussions online. All of a sudden you have TV at your disposal, but there's no bandwidth limitation. So you can take full advantage of that.

And so I could put 300 hours of video up and of my lectures and I'm a credible lecturer so turns out there was a market for that. And so you know what I was fortunate in that I got somewhere new first and so that's and then the podcasts are the same thing, right? Because it turns out that people can, probably more people can listen than can read. So that's a big deal. And people can listen when they can't read.

So you can listen when you're driving or when you're doing the dishes or exercising or any of those things. And so there's a new niche for the transmission of relatively complicated information. And it turns out there's a public hunger for it and no one knew that and so both of us are in the position where we're serving a market that's been made because of the new technology and we happen to be on the cutting edge of that and so I was actually I thought this through over about the last two months because I've been trying to make sense of what the hell is going on. It's like, what are you all you people doing here, listening to a lecture about, you know, a lecture about, well, it's a university level lecture, essentially,

about brain function and the structure of reality. It's a philosophical lecture. It's like, there's a public market for that. Turns out there is, you know, who would have guessed. But I think these new technologies have really opened that up. And so that's partly what I make of it. Then to the degree that it is personal, because there's lots of people on YouTube say,

and not all of them are having spectacular success with it, although some people are. I think the other thing that I've got going for me, let's say, is that I really do love being a psychologist and I'm very familiar with the psychological literature. I know the biological literature quite well. I know the clinical literature well. I've read widely in psychoanalysis and behaviorism and humanism and all the various schools

of clinical psychology and I'm a credible neuroscientist. And so I can weave all that together. And that's really interesting to people and helpful. And why wouldn't it be? Like all these clinicians that work through the 20th century, people like Carl Rogers and Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud and B.F. Skinner, the great behavioral psychologists. They're all trying to work through how to

help people solve complex problems, how to conceptualize the problems and how to solve them. So that's what I lecture about and I try to make my lectures practical. Like, here's some abstract information. Here's why you should know it. Here's what it would do if you implemented it in your life. That's how behavioral psychologists think. And the fact that people find that useful, well, yeah, right? That's what all these

people who are generating this information were trying to do. They were trying to generate useful information that would be of aid to people who were attempting to improve their mental health. And so it works. And so I'm fortunate that I had the opportunity to learn all of that and to practice it and then to enjoy talking about it with everyone. And that's working out. And so that's what I make of it. I think it's a great honor and privilege.

I truly believe that. I'm absolutely thrilled that you're all here. And I think both Dave and I, like we've been struck on the course of this tour with what these events are like, because lots of people are coming. We figure about 200,000 people so far. There's a lot of people, and people are here because they want to think about difficult and deep subjects in a way that's of utility to them and their families and their community. They're trying to develop vision for the life

and to take responsibility and to set things right. And so they're incredibly positive events. And so I'm thrilled about it. And the fame part, see, the way that that makes itself apparent to me is it's just a wider field of opportunity. So, so given that what the information that I'm providing seems to be useful for people, certainly useful for me, it's been useful for my family and for my students, the fact that that's useful for people is that's absolutely wonderful as far as I'm concerned.

So hooray, that's what I think. Well, as I tell you, one way or another every night, the honor and privilege is all mine, that I get to do this with you every night. And on that note, guys, we've done about 40 or 45 of these, as I've said, and they start, even though they're all different, they also kind of blend together. This one will absolutely stand out in my mind. You guys were phenomenal. Jordan with Sharp is Helen on that note. I'm gonna get out of here.

Makes her noise for Jordan Peterson, everybody. If you found this conversation meaningful, you might think about picking up Dad's books, maps of meaning, the architecture of belief, or his newer bestseller, 12 rules for life, and antidote to chaos. Both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. See JordanB.Putersand.com for audio, e-book, and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller. I really hope you enjoyed this podcast.

If you did, please leave a rating and Apple podcasts, a comment or a review, or share this episode with a friend. Next week's podcast is going to be a conversation with Jamil Giovanni, a lawyer, educator, and the author of Why Young Men, the Dangerous Allure of violent movements and what we can do about it talk to you next Sunday Follow me on my YouTube channel Jordan B Peterson on Twitter at Jordan B Peterson on Facebook at Dr. Jordan B Peterson and at Instagram at Jordan dot B dot Peterson Details on this show access to my blog Information about my tour dates and other events, and my list of recommended books can be found on my website, JordanB Peterson.com.

My online writing programs designed to help people straighten out their pasts, understand themselves in the present, and develop a sophisticated vision and strategy for the future can be found at selfauthoring.com. That's selfauthoring.com. From the Westwood One Podcast Network.